Tuesday poem #592 : Gabriel Ojeda-Sague : The Mange of Parking Lots

 

 

Every time I eat salmon, that coat
in my closet gets shinier.

You’d be right to assume inability
from such a cast as this.

All these things with fins: sharks,
taxis, old movies.

A map of Canada could be the size
of a scale model of Canada.

No one would be the wiser if you
stopped smoking cigarettes.

He said he couldn’t call it less than a
a Kentucky Derby of the heart.

Something to do in the event of hair
loss other than to recant.

I sleep silent, boyfriends have told me,
but I snore plenty in my dreams.

You drew the short straw; you must
plan out the Eiffel Tower.

To draw from memory the day your
father died.

In the beauty of his wife’s face, he saw
three months’ salary.

Be at rest, and you will inherit a country
unworthy of pigeons.

Because of this, the corrosion of towns,
the mange of parking lots.

Slalom among trees and think of
kids in the road.

Your cat moans, rather than meows,
an unsettling variation.

With the dedication of a parent, I
raise everything in front of me.

The night you became angular,
a firefly was perfectly still.

The novel you read devastates you
in a very literal sense.

Children are easily spooked, but are clearly
superior in inventing rivers.

Because he adopted the highway, all that
drove on it were seen as enemies.

Mind you, I wrote a memoir
and dedicated it to my life.

A magic trick has three parts: the one where
you weep, your mother, the prestige.

If I am in heaven by the time of this event, be sure
I am pricking little holes in the ground.

 

 

 

 

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and writer living in Chicago. He is most recently the author of Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019) and Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry and the TS Eliot Foundation’s Four Quartets Prize. He is also co-editor of An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979-1989. He is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago where he works in the study of sexuality.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan